“It’s not working,” Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, said yesterday.

Mr. Daus’s agency conducted a study in recent weeks and found that 67 percent of the 4,000 or so respondents said they did not pay a lick of attention when Eartha Kitt or Plcido Domingo or Michael Buffer (“Let’s get ready to rummmmmmmble!”) asked them, by recorded proxy, to wear their seat belts in a taxicab.

Moreover, nearly 12 percent of those questioned said they purposefully refused to buckle up because the announcements were annoying.

If we must have a goo-goo mayor, this is what he ought to be doing, instead of persecuting smokers: ridding us of these stagnant puddles of graft.